The last two decades have seen a revolution in Bordeaux. What Price Bordeaux? takes a novel approach in explaining the forces responsible for this change. The top châteaux have been obtaining unprecedented prices for their wines, while at the same time smaller chateau owners are going bankrupt. Enormous changes in the production and style of wine have been accomplished by advances in viticulture and vinification coupled with climatic changes. The battle between modernists and traditionalists plays out through the garage wines, felt by some to be the newest wave, and by others to be a caricature of Bordeaux. Pulling together information from a variety of sources including the market in Bordeaux, changing patterns of ownership, and new possibilities in viticulture and vinification, this book presents a unique overview of the forces making Bordeaux wine what it is today. The book considers the role of terroir, how events ranging from the phylloxera plague to global warming have changed the fundamental nature of Bordeaux, the mysteries of the en primeur system, the rising influence of oenologues and critics, the changing nature of the wine itself, and the rise and fall of various chateaux. A running theme is the powerful effect that the classification of 1855 continues to have on the chateaux of both Left and Right Banks, and this and the other classification systems are considered before concluding with a new classification of the châteaux based on the existing market.
What Price Bordeaux?
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It s extremely rare - dare I say even unique? - for a distinguished scientist previously unconnected with vines or wines to be let loose on the history of Bordeaux. It helps that he is sure to conduct his research with a rigor not generally found among wine writers, to ask awkward questions, and not to be put off with the many answers that don t satisfy his standards. Moreover, the scientist involved, Dr Benjamin Lewin, cannot be accused of ignorance about wines - he s a Master of Wine as well as a world expert on genes.
Is anyone here a subscriber to Cell, the review he founded, let alone a reader of books like his Molecular Basis of Gene Expression?
As a result of his background, What Price Bordeaux? ranges far wider and deeper than the title would suggest, covering most of the major elements in Bordeaux s fascinating history and curious ways with unique - yes, that word again - thoroughness. My approach, he writes, is more quantitative than has been common for a subject that is usually viewed somewhat subjectively - a rather dour-sounding attitude that happily does not in the least prevent a clear writing style. Moreover, the book s readability is greatly helped by a series of exemplary charts providing all sorts of useful information, such as that emphasizing the unstoppable rise of Merlot over the past few decades, not only on the Right Bank but in the rest of the Gironde as well.
To my great joy, one of Lewin s most penetrating analyses demonstrates the lack of correlation between Parker s scores and market values. Retail prices for Parker s 95-pointers for the 2005 vintage varied from $600 for Château Margaux down to a mere $44 for Château Monbousquet, another wine made by one of Parker s heroes, Gérard Perse, he of Pavie fame. Moreover, one of his charts demonstrates the way in which the garage wines so beloved of Parker proved to be a transient phenomenon that started to fade with the Millennium. In fact, as Lewin clearly proves, the biggest single factor in determining the price of a wine is the one it fetched in the previous vintage. There is considerable inertia with regards to changing the relative prices of châteaux, he says. Christian Seely of AXA Millésimes reckons that this delay can be as long as ten years for improvements, if quality resulting from investment is to be reflected in the price of the wine. This delay is exploited by many a buyer confident enough of his or her palate to cash in on improving wines before the cautious and lumbering market has caught up with their progress.
Inevitably much of the ground he covers is familiar, but he usually finds something original to say even on such well-known subjects as the drainage by the Dutch of the marshes along the Gironde, which, as he points out, lowered the overall water table and thus helped the quality of the wine produced on the precious gravel along the Médoc. Looking at the very varied wines produced in 1855, neat or fortified, he can legitimately ask whether there were in fact any consumers who knew the taste of the unadulterated wines of the Médoc at the time? I was also glad that he agrees with me, implicitly anyway, in stating that grafted vines were introduced rather later than the 1890s indeed, that the Graves wasn t completely turned over to grafted vines until after World War I.
Even a keen error-spotter like me is rarely able to find a quibble, though my eyebrows did shoot up when, in the context of the region s many vintages of the century, he says that 1961 is now all but forgotten. There are still a few worth drinking, and I hope that the royalties from his excellent book will enable Dr Lewin to buy a bottle of Palmer. --Nicholas Faith, Fine Wine Magazine
Is anyone here a subscriber to Cell, the review he founded, let alone a reader of books like his Molecular Basis of Gene Expression?
As a result of his background, What Price Bordeaux? ranges far wider and deeper than the title would suggest, covering most of the major elements in Bordeaux s fascinating history and curious ways with unique - yes, that word again - thoroughness. My approach, he writes, is more quantitative than has been common for a subject that is usually viewed somewhat subjectively - a rather dour-sounding attitude that happily does not in the least prevent a clear writing style. Moreover, the book s readability is greatly helped by a series of exemplary charts providing all sorts of useful information, such as that emphasizing the unstoppable rise of Merlot over the past few decades, not only on the Right Bank but in the rest of the Gironde as well.
To my great joy, one of Lewin s most penetrating analyses demonstrates the lack of correlation between Parker s scores and market values. Retail prices for Parker s 95-pointers for the 2005 vintage varied from $600 for Château Margaux down to a mere $44 for Château Monbousquet, another wine made by one of Parker s heroes, Gérard Perse, he of Pavie fame. Moreover, one of his charts demonstrates the way in which the garage wines so beloved of Parker proved to be a transient phenomenon that started to fade with the Millennium. In fact, as Lewin clearly proves, the biggest single factor in determining the price of a wine is the one it fetched in the previous vintage. There is considerable inertia with regards to changing the relative prices of châteaux, he says. Christian Seely of AXA Millésimes reckons that this delay can be as long as ten years for improvements, if quality resulting from investment is to be reflected in the price of the wine. This delay is exploited by many a buyer confident enough of his or her palate to cash in on improving wines before the cautious and lumbering market has caught up with their progress.
Inevitably much of the ground he covers is familiar, but he usually finds something original to say even on such well-known subjects as the drainage by the Dutch of the marshes along the Gironde, which, as he points out, lowered the overall water table and thus helped the quality of the wine produced on the precious gravel along the Médoc. Looking at the very varied wines produced in 1855, neat or fortified, he can legitimately ask whether there were in fact any consumers who knew the taste of the unadulterated wines of the Médoc at the time? I was also glad that he agrees with me, implicitly anyway, in stating that grafted vines were introduced rather later than the 1890s indeed, that the Graves wasn t completely turned over to grafted vines until after World War I.
Even a keen error-spotter like me is rarely able to find a quibble, though my eyebrows did shoot up when, in the context of the region s many vintages of the century, he says that 1961 is now all but forgotten. There are still a few worth drinking, and I hope that the royalties from his excellent book will enable Dr Lewin to buy a bottle of Palmer. --Nicholas Faith, Fine Wine Magazine
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Masterpiece on Bordeaux Wines,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: What Price Bordeaux? (Hardcover)
A very well written and easy to follow book about one of the most difficult to understand wine producing regions in the world. Mr Lewin goes in depth into many of the forces that have shaped Bordeaux and its many diferent regions, wines, and styles. He explains with exquisite details the historical, cultural, political, financial, marketing and climatic elements, as well as the many paradoxes, that have contributed to make Bordeaux what it is today. Mr Lewin's book is well balanced, he writes about the positive aspects but is equally candid about the many scandals and ploys of the wine trade. He has done a wonderful job researching facts and the many graphics in the book are very clear and easy to follow. This is a book where the expert will learn many things unknown before, and the novice will acquire a universe of knowledge, not only about Bordeaux, but also about wine in general.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I wanted still more,
By Nick Stengel (Washington DC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: What Price Bordeaux? (Hardcover)
Lewin has written a book with a wealth of information and wonderful presentation of descriptive statistics. He is also a persuasive historian, going back to the beginning of the wine trade in Bordeaux that preceded wine production. In his narrative, he makes much of the current dtrials and tribulations of the region seem reactionary and short sighted.
My one wish for the book, and I wished for it almost every page, was that Lewin was an economist. He's got all this great information that circumscribe important issues of the wine trade, but uses none of it in making any actual arguments. For example, he skewers the notion that the 1855 Classification was based on anything other than prevailing and historic prices for wine of the ranked chateaux. But then fails to connect the argument that pricing is a proxy for all the information the Bordelais supposedly failed to attend to: terroir, quality, etc. What a person is willing to pay for a product is an aggregation of all known information! From his exhaustive narrative, it is clear that the Bordeaux wine trade is a train wreck of an economic market. Yet that does not preclude economic analytical tools from making sense of the morass. It's an excellent book and I wanted still more.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thoughtful and interesting,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: What Price Bordeaux? (Kindle Edition)
Repetitious but still interesting. If you are interested in wine brands this is an exploration of branding in bordeaux (e.g. the 1855 classification, and others) and how it affects price along with other factors such as terroir.
For fine wine marketers this is one of the most interesting books available.
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